Albatross
by Chipping
Summary: -"they will live with ghosts," he says, quietly, almost a whisper. hermione frowns. "don't they already?"- Post-DH, Pre-Epilogue. Harry and Hermione must find a way to fight the perpetual war, even if they want all to be well. Harry/Hermione.
1. Part 1

Albatross  
pt.1

_The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us [...] As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."  
~Charles Darwin_

after, she notices that things are mostly just the same.

molly keeps making them sweaters every christmas.

when ron is angry, his cheeks flush like he has drunk too much. he is always the one who walks away from the fight, with an expression that says he has once again been defeated. like he always has something to prove. but when he kisses her, he still smells clean as soap and he smiles crookedly when he pulls away and says, "sometimes, i'm not sure you know how lucky i am." so, of course, a part of her feels like he has a knot inside of her and he pulls her back. like a dog on a chain.

she still reads voraciously.

at night, the dreams still come. when she wakes, her body stings like someone has shook her mercilessly. like someone has carved something on her. she sits up in bed, rubs her arms. ron wakes, tries to offer her hot tea and cold biscuits that molly sends to them in brightly colored tins. he kisses the small of her neck, and she says that she feels better. but the dreams keep coming. those sort of things don't go away. you can't feel better. she wants to tell ron that, make him understand. she dunks her biscuits in the tea and watches as he turns his back to her in bed. his skin is pale where his hair meets his neck.

"ron?" she whispers. then louder: "ron?"

but he can't hear her. he has disappeared.

her biscuit gets soggy and she throws it in the wastebasket. she goes into the kitchen, pours the tea out. over the kitchen sink, there is a window and it is full of moon.

somewhere out there, there is a moon over the sky full of people. she closes her eyes, and sees a tangle of black hair, his back turned to the same kind of red hair that litters her own bed.

after, he hasn't changed, as far as she can tell. she always thought things would change for him. for

the both of them. but the truth is that things are much the same and she knows that. there are things that attach to you like a lining buried in your skin.

the truth is that after all those battles and all those years of blood and skin and fear have stitched themselves to her insides and no matter how many cups of tea and no matter how many cold biscuits, she can't scrub it away. it has become a part of her. she wonders if maybe she has dissolved into it, like a grain of salt in the sea.

after, how can things change when everything is stitched into the sinew? she asks the moon-filtered night this, but really she asks the person who lays underneath it with his eyes unglassed and the same sort of dreams about to settle in his head like roots in the ground.

after, he realizes it's never really over. you can kill one, you can kill the one, but there's always another. and then another. the job is never really done.

the fact is, no matter what he does, will ever do, people still want to believe in evil.

but everyone wants to believe there is a respite. even ginny, who combs her hair next to him in bed every night. he finds red hair tangled around every single one of his buttons. she kisses him with a love so clean he can see right through it.

after, he won't marry her. she wants him to, he gets that feeling in the way she shows things that they should share. meals first, every night. then, a closet full of her clothes at his place. now,

she starts bringing in furniture piece by piece; an end table, a chest of drawers. it's like she awaiting another important person to walk through the front door.

sometimes he wonders if she's waiting for that other part of him to walk through the door. waiting for the boy who lived. the one she fell in love with. he wonders where that person went.

but, it's all right, he tells himself. nothing's really changed. he can still laugh when they put on otis redding and ginny dances in her sweatpants that used to belong to ron. he starts watching tv. not the news. never the news. but sitcoms. muggle things.

it's all right.

but the dreams never die, because the fact is that there's always another and he knows that. not everything wraps up nicely like in a half-hour comedy.

this isn't fiction.

this is real life.

things don't always end well in real life.

he doesn't know if he can feel this way, the way they seem to do in the tv shows. if he should. but he tries, learns to cook, make phone calls, starts jogging in the mornings. the best way to move on is to just move on. he can't feel this way, not when ginny is running her hands up and down his back like she wants to light him up like a match. he can't feel this way, he tells himself.

just marry her, he tells himself.

but then the letter comes, the one in a handwriting he knows well. her handwriting. and it changes everything.

this is the part no one will know about, he tells himself in his head. this isn't the stuff they write stories about. people will want to forget this part.

he is right.

the letter. she cannot believe that she sent it. she owls it out and finds that her hands shaking. she tries to scrub them under cold water. she sits on them. but it doesn't change what she has done, and she has done it.

part of her feels like she has done something very wrong, like she has just ended both of them in a couple simple paragraphs. in a way, she has. she doesn't know it yet, but something ends in the moment that letter goes out.

but she must go back to where it started, not when it ends.

here is the thing about after: most things that seem real are only illusions. when she hears people talking about peace, she thinks of a flickering candle always about to go out. there are people in the parks, children going to school, but people are still scared of harry when he parts his hair that covers his forehead and they still won't name the one that she helped destroy. she doesn't fear like other people do. she doesn't fear like those who wake up and wash their faces and go to work and hope and push down and hope and ignore the itch of fear that scratches deep inside of them. no, she fears with a fear so real and raw she feels like she is always on guard. her fear is constantly vigilant, her fear never sleeps.

and the fact is that her fear is the real fear. that is why the dreams come and why she knows she will never be rid of them. you can't wash that fear away. it's a stain, and it covers all of her.

and it's also, because after, no one wants to admit it, but there are people on the other team. they do not like her, hermione granger. but most of all, they hate what she is all about, about her need to stand for things that are... right. there is no other way to put it. she knows that. for things that are good to their core.

and maybe that's why she sends the letter.

but she must go back to where it started, not where it ends.

it is sunday. the rain pours down her windows in long gray streaks. she is sorting through the mail. there is always mail, not all of them happy. because there is another team, she knows that. the charms that surround her and ron's house are so strong that sometimes ron wanders into them and she has to retrieve him from wandering around the yard, him mumbling, "i don't think that i know where my toes are. are my toes here? hermione, i can't feel my lips."

the man, she doesn't know who he is. his head is shaved to the scalp but his eyebrows are white and bushy. he doesn't say anything when she answers the door, and when he is already inside, hermione can only murmur, "how in the bloody hell did you get past... _everything_?"

the man never announces his name, but merely stands in her kitchen, wiping off the rain from his three piece suit that looks fashionably muggle. when she comes into the kitchen, staring at him wide-eyed and with her hand in her pocket, fingers clutched around her wand, she says, "ron isn't here. i won't talk. i won't tell you where harry potter is." without thinking, she rolls her sleeve up to expose the etching in her arm that has turned scartissue pink. she wonders if it speaks for itself, if it says there is no depth or breadth of evil that hermione granger has not seen.

the man bows his head. he sits down at her kitchen table, lights a cigarette. there is something about him that eases her. but if there's one thing hermione knows, it's that you can never know enough. she trusts few, especially after.

he takes a long pull on his cigarette, says, "you can release your grip on your wand, miss granger." his voice is tinted with an accent that she can't put her finger on. it's as crisp as an american, but there's a gentleness that speaks of something completely foreign. every time she tries to understand it, the voice slides away from her, like she has lost the voice in a fog. he pulls up a coffee cup that is sitting on the table and tilts his cigarette ash into it. "i mean you absolutely no harm. not in the immediate sense. no, not at all. i mean only to show you the truth, for there are people who want to hide it from you."

she stands in the middle of her kitchen and doesn't know what to do. the man in front of her has perused through the charms strong enough to liquefy the brains of any half-way intelligent wizard or witch. the fact is that there is nothing to do now. if the man wants to end her, he will end her. this is not the first time that she has been in this situation before.

the man, when she looks at him, looks familiar from some place. like a face from a dream. smoke falls like water out of his mouth when he says after a long period of silence, "yes, it's true. you know me. it's hard to explain, because it doesn't work with logical thought. but you, hermione granger, will understand it better than harry potter. who needs to know too."

the room is quiet. ron has left to visit his cousins who live down the road. they are watching a quidditch game later this weekend but he has left his jersey that he had so desperately wanted to wear. the whole house feels full of him, but she can't help but feel like she slips through the cracks.

the man smiles, halfly. "you don't need an explanation, i see. because there's a part of you, hermione granger, that knows very explicitly that you don't belong here. not in this world. not in the after."

his words hurt her, to the core. because they are true, and because she doesn't want them to be true. all that fighting, all that blood, the blood that still covered her like a blanket in her dreams, wasn't this what they were fighting for? for a quiet life that were only full of rainy nights holding clammy hands, and eating out for lunch, and office jobs, and christmases where children (her children? she shivers at the thought) don't have to be hushed and they sent christmas cards to their grandparents who they knew were alive. but she falls through this life. she suddenly realizes, quite suddenly, that this is why everything has changed. because now she doesn't quite fit. not at all.

the man stands up. he extinguishes his cigarette in the coffee cup and it sizzles dead. he walks to her, stands right in front of her. when he looks right in her eyes, she sees for the first time that they are bright green. his state takes her aback, like he has grabbed her by the throat. she can't breathe. from here, so close to the man, she can see that his eyebrows are speckled with ebony black hair. her throat feels small and tiny in the house, which feels so big, so impossibly big.

"you know, hermione granger. you know quite well that the lies are aplenty during peace. because peace doesn't exist. not really. not for people... like us." the man smells like nicotine and something else. something like her own body, like the cleanness of soap and that distinctly musky sent of... she cannot place it. but it reminds her of study halls and tents in the wilderness. tangled hair through her fingers. black hair wrapped around one of her sweater buttons.

the man says nothing else, not much. he gives her some paperwork, tells her that its charmed to burn in twenty hours.

"it's yours to choose what you must and should do. but you know," the man says. he is smoking another cigarette, holding it loosely through his top and bottom lip. it bobs buoy-like between the two. "but you do know that peace is only an illusion that is possible because there are always people fighting. there must be constant soldiering. vigilance. only the ones who know this must can fight for it, because they are the ones that see past the veil. see past the illusion."

she watches him leave from her spot near the parlor window. he cuts through the fog like a knife through butter. the charms seemed to melt around him- she watches as they glimmer awake at the possibility of movement, but when they reach out to touch him with their spidery arms, they shrink like wool in the wash. like he doesn't belong here. like he doesn't fit.

maybe this is what makes her trust him when he disappears from the house. his letter shakes in her hands. she reads it with a ferocity that she reads everything with, with acute attention to the detail, to the implications of it.

what is says isn't easy. she know this from the seconds she reads the couple of lines that say, "the war is never over, it is a battle that can never stop. the duality of our existence is in each of us. but you, hermione granger, are quite literally torn in two. there are two of you warring inside. luckily, both of you are good. unluckily, this means that you cannot fit easily anywhere. unluckily, this means, at the present, you are living a lie. and, unluckily, you know that you are not the only one of your kind. you are quite aware of this."

she is. she is aware of it everywhere she goes, when she tries to laugh some days and finds that the part of her that wants to just can't. it hurts in her chest like a hallow cough. but she had hoped to hold this pain, this ever present pain of missing, in her like a cancer that kills slowly but cannot be spread. but when she meets his face, in those moments of expected goodness, when the three of them are drunk and in a pub and eating chips out of a greasy envelope of butcher paper or when they go for rides in mr. weasley's muggle car, in these great moments, she meets his eyes one at a time. and she sees it, the same sort of pain. the cancer that eats her alive. when she realizes that the war made her aware of who she really was: not a bookish prude with the ability for a good laugh and a quick wit, but someone constantly on guard for the presence of goodness and evil and the way those two weave themselves through the very fabric of everything.

_you know that you are not the only one of your kind._

it takes a couple of days to write the letter. ron comes home from the quidditch match and he's "bloody pissed" he says when he picks up his hanging jersey. "blood pissed i forgot this. can't believe it." he doesn't ask her how her day was and she offers nothing.

they eat spaghetti for dinner. at night, he curls like a question mark against her body and she only stares at the ceiling thinking of the charred papers in the downstairs wastebasket, knowing what she must do, what she has no choice but to do.

the next day when ron leaves to get some groceries, she sits down and writes: dear harry, it is my greatest regret to inform you that our lives will change unforgivably. but again, this is no choice of ours. has it ever been? will it ever be?

she puts her quill down, takes a sip of tea. she continues writing.

it began with a letter, he thinks. that letter than told him what he was. you're a wizard, harry james potter. so, he thinks, it only seems right that it should end in a letter.

he receives it on a day so cold the birds are silent. the owl comes to his window covered in a flurry of snow which he shakes from his feathers with a look of true annoyance. he brings him inside, sets him by the fire and says, "i know what it's like to be cold as piss, old boy. i'm sorry."

at first, he's a little annoyed at whoever has sent the letter; he watches the owl lick the ice off the tip of his taloned feet. but, when he sees the name on the return address, he immediately knows that something was about to change.

hermione granger, steely-faced hermione jane granger, with her stubborn expressions and ice-clean spirit, would only ever send an owl for the most serious of reasons. there are things like e-mails now, now that there is an after. but an owl means only the gravest of matters.

he reads the note. for a while the house is so quiet, he can hear the sandpapery tongue of the owl scrape across his icy talons. the note sits still in his fist and he finds he is holding it delicately, like one might a child, one just born.

he will be honest to himself, he thinks. i will be honest to myself about the note. about the stillness of the house, the stillness of the house before ginny awakes. sometimes, he thinks he hears a hike in her breathing, like she has just awoke. he sits quietly in his kitchen and thinks of how he will be honest to himself.

honesty, something that has been pushed away like dust in a corner after. after it all. honesty about the life where everyone tip-toes around like life is normal, that it will remain this way now that the one is dead. but there is not just one, that is honesty. honesty is hard and it hurts going down, and he was sure that he was the only one who shared in this feeling, this feeling that all is not well.

he goes into the living room, turns on the television. it is still muted from last night when ginny turned the volume down so she could talk at him, saying, don't you see, harry? don't you see... your eyes. i see it in your eyes. like you're crumbling. crumbling in between my fingers like sand. aren't you... happy? this is what you always wanted. what we fought for. his hands had been folded in front of his lap. he hadn't been able to look her in the eye.

on the screen, it is a nature documentary, one of those with soothing narration. a blue sky opens up like a blanket. then, in slow motion, a huge white bird, wings stretching from tip of screen to tip of screen enters the frame. it swoops into the air like it is hung there by some great invisible string. a second later, another bird follows, its great webbed feet translucent in the warm blue sky. they are together soon, wing stroke matching wing stroke.

he watches, transfixed. the owl next to him is quiet, as if it is watching too. and it's strange, in this moment, or at least he thinks so, that in this moment that seems to belong to the great white birds, that he hears hermione's voice. it is definitely her voice, smooth and calm and steady. she recites her letter, saying, _harry, i know that this will ruin our lives. but then again, we always knew that. this was never really our world, us orphans in this world that we were not born into. but we have been adopted into it in the cruelest way, and this makes us more aware than them all. then ron. then ginny. oh harry, i am sorry, but that is just how it is. we are soldiers of a constant vigilance and our awareness makes it so we can never sleep, not in the ignorance that they desire of us. again, i am sorry. for you more than me, but for myself as well. do you see an alternative? i do not._

he doesn't either. this isn't one of those sorts of things, he thinks. there is no other option.

tomorrow he will leave. to say goodbye. he hears someone padding down the hallway. the breathing has stopped, the deep sleep sort of breathing coming from his bedroom. she is awake and soon she will be here. her figure will be standing in the door frame so soon he realizes that he is holding his breathe.

he will not marry her, he knows this now. what use are goodbyes now?

inside the letter, there is a small watch, a leather wrist watch. he already knows what it is, can see the small shimmer of magic glimmering at the very corner of his eye. the footsteps are almost there, he can feel them shaking the floor under his feet.

he grips the watch and feels the pull in his belly button, like a fish on a hook. the fringes of his vision is vignetted with the swirling blackness of the portkey. but the last thing he sees is the great white bird drift the sky like it will never fall, like it can't, even though it must eventually.


	2. Part 2

**Albatross**

**pt.2**

_A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others._

_~ Charles Darwin_

when he comes to, he finds the portkey was made quickly, in haste, in distraction. he has landed sloppily. a sharp pain flows up from his elbow and when he reaches to his forehead he finds the warm stream flowing down his head is his own.

his vision is shaky at best, but he is used to this. he is the one who lived after all, and he has lived because he has learned to adapt quickly. he sits up, squints when he finds that his glasses are scratched from the fall. but he can see.

his surroundings are rocky, green. somewhere in the distance, there is the crashing of waves against a rock littered coastline. he cannot see water.

he sits there for awhile. he knows that his wand is in his back pocket, but for some reason he is not alarmed. something inside of him tells him to wait, and so he does. the distant roar of a tide never ceases and it starts to match the pulse in his hands, in the wound on his head. he takes out his wand, looks around before mumbling a quick charm to his forehead. he feels the skin knitting itself hastily together but he knows now that he will have a scar, another.

he waits. the sun gets lower in the sky, but it burns into his skin like a fired knife. sweat falls in a thin blade down his back, but he waits. while he waits, a lizard the size of his arm rumbles out onto the black rock he is lying on. its tongue slithers out at him and the two of them stare at each other. he thinks to that tongue, that same tongue, that came for him years before. he sees blood and darkness and smells that dank must of death and hears her voice screaming and he tries to feel her pulse and he sees red hair wrapped like a knot around the end of his wand. but that is only for a moment, and suddenly all he can see in the darkness of the lizard's eye, the scales of his flesh. for a second, the sun is setting and it sounds as if the tide is coming in and the lizard is becoming silhouetted in the sky turning blood red. it seems to him that he too is only a silhouette. for once, in a long time, he feels the heart in the temple of his forehead slow and steady. it is a feeling he has not felt in a long time.

the lizard moves on, lumbering past him. he still waits.

right before the sun sets, a figure mounts the mound of rock where he sits. he doesn't know who it is, but it is male. he is bald. there's a cigarette in his mouth, and smoke makes red halos over his head against the horizon. he wears a perfectly ironed suit. when he is about three feet away from him, he pauses. the cigarette hangs precariously from his bottom lip.

when the stranger speaks, his voice is un-accented, "you're a patient man, harry potter."

he looks at the man and feels as if he might know him. he tries to place him but the connection alludes him like sand through a closed fist. his eyes look at him with a genuine pensiveness; in the darkness of twilight, he cannot place the color.

he shrugs, but never strays his eyes away from the stranger's gaze. he says, "i've had a fair share of waiting in my life. i've gotten used to it."

the stranger shakes his head up and down, cracks a smile around the limp cigarette in his mouth. "i'd say you have, mr. potter. you may call me roger. for now, i suppose that's a good enough of a name as any, right?"

he doesn't question this, because there is something about this man that he cannot place, like he is merely a heat wave, a hallucination. you don't name things like this. roger it is. roger it will be. it's as good as any for something that may or may not exist.

he finally stands. his legs are coated in a thin layer of what feels like sea salt and the salt of his own body. the back of his shirt is glued like skin to the back of his shoulder blades. after wipes his hands on his slacks, he says, "well. i am patient, but i suppose this is the time where you tell me why i am here."

the man laughs. "ah, yes, you would think that, mr. potter. for sure, it is fair to think that. but time is a tricky lady. she bends where she pleases. and we'll have to leave it at that for now at the very least."

again, he finds that no questions arise in his brain. a part of him half-way doesn't believe that he is actually experiencing this, that perhaps the heat and the constant pattering of the waves has lead him to sleep. but the gash in his head still feels like a non-bleeding knot and the skin there hurts like it has been harshly zippered undone. the other scar on his forehead does not hurt.

roger starts walking and he follows him. his legs are lead-stiff and full of blood-needles. the air, even though it is bringing in a cool water breeze, feels like a hot blanket. this is not cool, sad england. he is far from that, and suddenly he is aware that this is his first steps off of that small chunk of land in the freezing atlantic. it smells different here, like a different ocean, different trees. the land feels different, newer, like it has just arisen from the sea.

the world is getting dark, but roger's steps are full of authority, as if he has walked here his entire life. he has to keep him eye on roger's cigarette's orange ember to know where he is going.

they climb through a bramble of small dense trees for awhile. the ground is a black rock full of things that scramble to and fro. some are hairy, petite, other are slick and scaly. the world around him is alive and so separated from the place that he used to inhabit that he wonders how he never thought of that: that the rest of the world might have never known him, never known of the boy who lived and who continues to live in a sort of way. they may have never named the one who must not be named not because of fear or superstition, but they didn't know of him. they would not utter his name because they never know it. a little piece of him settles when he thinks of this, that the rest of the world may have been gifted the gift of ignorance.

some people knew not of the great war. they know not of the after. his heart stills for a second, and then beats with due vigilance.

it feels like hours but they finally break out of the thick brush. they are on the edge of a cliff, a small cliff that descends before lowering and flattening to a startling white beach. the sea in front of them is pearly in the white of the moon. the beach itself is littered with small black dots that move slowly and bark like dogs.

"seals," he murmurs and roger turns to him and smiles.

lighting a cigarette, roger says, "they're cute buggers, but they'll eat your face if given the choice. do be careful, mr. potter."

they stand for a few minutes on the edge of the cliff, watching for something. he doesn't know what it might be, but they wait none the less. the smell of roger's cigarette drifts through the air and mixes with the salty brine of the sea. off in the distance, a seal. the sea here is quiet, only crashing into carpet soft sand. to the far left of where they are standing, a large outcropping of rock raises like a giant black finger into the sky.

then it happens, what they've been waiting for. a dark figure comes from the distance, near the giant rock. it moves with a brisk pace, like it knows where it must go. but suddenly it stops, looks directly at them.

the features of obscure, black and silhouetted in the lowering sun, in the darkening night, but he knows who it is. he knows instantly, and with that, he realizes why he is there. roger will explain later, he knows that, but he knows that she is here, she is alone, and he knows that it's all over now. there's no going back.

"you expected miss granger?" roger asks. he is staring darkly into the side of his face.

he shakes his head, says, "perhaps, always. i should always expect her."

they descend the cliff. it takes more skill than what he might have expected. but when they finally reach the beach, he can see her in the distance, standing stiff as a board. she is now looking the sea. he walks towards her, hesitantly, like he doesn't know her, or as if he has no idea what to say. like he might never know what to say, especially since now that they both know.

when he reaches her, she is still looking out into the distance, towards the sea. the tide has started descend again, but it still laps against her nude toes that are dirty around the edges and unpolished.

he examines her for a few brief seconds. her hair is cut short, the ends tickling the lobes of her ears. she is smaller, lost weight, and he realizes he has too. most days he finds that he has gone all day thinking of nothing but the after, and only at the end of the day does he realize that he has forgotten to eat. she is wearing a sweater, a pair of shorts that expose her long white legs that gleam in the moonlight. in her left hands, she is clutching a large bottle of wine and half of it is empty; her lips are dark and purple-y and suddenly he is aware that hermione, ironically, is a bit of a lush.

finally, he says, "funny meeting you here," and instantly he feels so silly, like he is eleven again and he doesn't know what to say to the outgoing, pushy bushy-haired girl who has just opened the door to his train cabin.

but she laughs, lifts the wine bottle to her lips and takes a large gulp. she passes it to him. she has still not looked at him, not even remotely. her eyes are locked out in the distance where the water breaks on some outlying invisible rocks in a wrath of white frothiness.

he takes the wine bottle and tilts it back. the wine is bad and cheap and it burns as it goes down his throat. he realizes that he has not eaten in a long time and the wine will go quickly to his head. but he doesn't care, and after he's had a couple of swigs, he swings towards her direction and asks, "do you trust him?" he tosses his head towards roger, who is standing back near the rocks that line the edge of the beach. his cigarette glows in the light.

she still doesn't look at him. instead, she shakes her head and says, "do you?"

he thinks back to roger's figure on the horizon, the way that he talked. finally, he takes a swig of wine, says, "i shouldn't. i mean, i shouldn't trust anyone, not really. but think that i do. i do trust him. but do you, hermione?"

it's the first time that he's said her name, and it seems to catch her off-guard. she straightens, as if hearing her name has snapped her out of her drunken silence. she folds her arms across the front of her chest and turns to him. her eyes are dark in the night, and she meets his gaze right on, directly ahead. her lips are in a straight line as she says, "the only person i trust is you, harry."

she grabs the wine and starts heading up the beach. raising up the bottle in the air, she yells back, "but what choice do we have? what choice do we have but to trust him?"

her figure starts to disappear, and as it becomes small and black, he closes his eyes, knowing what she has said is true, knowing that it is so very true, it hurts inside of him.

she arrives a day before him, here to this little strip of land out in the middle of pacific. roger (as he later named himself), shows her to a cabin that lay in the copse of low-laying trees. inside, there is a bed, a nightstand. piled high in the corner of the cabin is a stack of old dusty books.

"so, you heard i like to read?" she asks coyly. she holds a backpack of hastily packed clothes and several toothbrushes.

roger, always smoking, smiles over his cigarette. "these books are not necessarily for pleasure. we're going to need hermione granger the brightest student of hogwarts to make an re-appearance."

she frowns, starts flipping through the books, "who's to say that she ever left?"

roger laughs and before he exits, he says, "then read carefully, miss granger. you never know what you might find."

the books are old, older than any she had gone through even at hogwarts. some pages literally crumble when she turns them. some of the dialect is old, in an ancient version of english that she has to cross-reference with the newer books to decipher. she sits for hours, her feet folded in front of her, writing hastily in a notebook.

the question that she asks over and over again: is it possible? is it possible?

she has no answer, even after hours and hours of researching loops of information. so when roger comes back with a bottle of wine, she grabs it from him, and with the end of a pen pops the cork into the wine before taking a long, deep swig.

"so, i suppose that you haven't had much luck?" roger asks. he smells of the sea and sweat. his lips are curled in a half-concerned, half-amused grin. he looks around the room and she's sure that he sees the chaos of the cabin for what it truly looks like: a slew of books half-opened, some stacked, some seemingly carelessly opened and stacks of notebook paper scrawled on, full of arrows and calculations and messy lines of notes.

she throws a deadly stare at him, takes another drink. "it's a rather shit job that you've given me, roger."

roger laughs and then they are quiet. they both stare at the pile of papers sitting on the ground, of the books tossed every which way. the outside sounds of the island fill the room and for a second those sounds almost consume them.

finally, after a very long sober moment, she whispers, to her hands that are folded in front of her, "is it possible? it it even possible to do what you told me about in the letter?"

when she looks up at roger, his eyebrows are creased and he isn't smoking. it dawns on her that there is something in his eyes that she hasn't seen before. she cannot place it, but for once it makes a piece of her stir, like she hasn't felt in a long time.

"you know..." she mumbles, looking at him intensely. "you know how to do it."

he frowns, quickly wiping the expression from his face. he looks up and out into the distance and says, "it doesn't work like that, miss granger. this isn't the time or place."

standing, she almost loses her footing. the wine is sloshing in her brain, but the words that come out of her mouth are true to her real emotion, "you keep mentioning time like it something quite understandable, quite readable. like it's a good book that you read once. but i don't know if i believe that. because who knows about those sorts of things? what if the time is never right or wrong. it just... is."

roger says nothing. he simply lights a cigarette, leaves while saying, "potter will be here tomorrow, granger. i'm sorry."

when he leaves, she doesn't return to the books. instead, she walks to the beach, takes off her clothes. the water is warm and the moon glows against the pale of her england skin. she floats easily in the salty sea and she watches as the full moon rises overhead. she closes her eyes and instead of seeing the moon she thinks back. back past the way red hair once littered her house, back past the days and days of interviews and pictures of her when everything seemed for a few brief seconds that it might be okay. back past when her hair was long and bushy and she still cared more for her grades than her life. she remembers another body of water as dark and smooth as the ocean she drifts on, remembers the cool night air when a young boy who had no business becoming a man did spells that he shouldn't have known how to do. she remembers the ghostly white of a patronus, strong and full. white, like the moon above her them, above her now. the patronus, as solid and good as the boy by the lake. both, a part of him. both, a version of him, one the growing manchild, one the external version of what was already inside of him- courage, virtue, a determination so solid it hurt to look at. she shielded her eyes, turning her face away, like she had seen a part of him so naked she had no right to gaze upon it. each part, in that moment, whole in part. each a piece of each other, perfect in their own form.

her eyes open quickly. above her, the moon looks like it has been perfectly cut from a cloth of navy silk. the night makes her mind so clear it shocks her, like she has jumped into a pool of cold water. she is in her body and yet out of it. her fingers move over her bare stomach just to make sure that she's really here, in this moment. for in this moment, she understands the partition between who she is and who she knows she could be. the essence and the body. she lifts her hand, spreads her fingers and traces the circle of the moon. for a second she thinks she could almost take it from the sky.

"so cleanly cut," she mumbles to herself. "a cleanly cut copy."

and suddenly she knows that it's possible. she doesn't know how she will do it, but she has seen it in one form and she knows that it can happen in another. she knows it because she is hermione granger, and this is what she was raised for, what the war has bred into her. she has found the last resource available to her, because this is why she is alive right now, here in the after.

she knows that he will arrive tomorrow. she knows what she must do.

she knows what _they_ must do, now that they have no choice.

she dries herself on the beach, watching the moon ripple on the water. the horizon stretches for miles and she thinks that somewhere on it he is sitting tonight with his hands draped around a woman who's red hair shines in a halo of light. that woman will turn to him and tell him that she's so glad it's over, that all of it's over. in part, she is right. in part, she is wrong, because it's just beginning but she just doesn't know it yet. and, in a way, she will never know, not if it's done right, not if it's truly possible.

"it is possible," she says to the sky, which is perfectly separated into sky and moon, perfectly separated like all things are, like hermione granger and harry potter are.


	3. Part 3

**Albatross**

_pt. 3_

_Let each man hope and believe what he can._

~Charles Darwin

he doesn't ask questions. they both have to share the tight, cramped quarters of the cabin, and when she is sitting by the flickering light of the fireplace at night, her eyes moving rapidly over the pages of her stacked books, he doesn't ask questions. hermione granger has never had a problem talking. she'll talk when she's ready, he thinks, he knows.

they don't see roger often, just once after the first night he came to the island. he left them a parcel of food wrapped tightly in foreign newsprint and a whole case of the wine that stains hermione's lips every night. she keeps very quiet as roger moves around the room, her lips pursed in a very straight line. nobody talks.

"again, be careful of the seals," roger notes, smiling. he is wearing a slick perfectly-pressed suit. the top of his bald head glimmers in a halo of sweat. he dabs it with a gray silk handkerchief and before folding it into his breast pocket.

the only exchange he can see between hermione and roger is when roger is about to leave. the both of them look at each other. he thinks he sees roger's eyebrow lift. hermione simply nods her head. it means something, but he does not know what.

she will talk when she wants to, he tells himself. he watches as she makes tea with a saucepan over the fire. the morning light is orange. when she turns to look at him, ask him if he would, "need some tea or are you too hot as it is?" the sun hits her face and illuminates the tip of her face. for a second, she is on fire, she seems alive from the tip of her fingers to the end of her scalp. it then that he realizes that he has never had to worry. not about hermione granger. she, this woman with the hair that flies from her head as wild as feathers on a bird, she is his constant, his ever-trust.

she will talk when she wants to, when she knows that she must. he knows this, so he asks no questions.

he manages to tear her from her books for a few minutes so that they can take walks. she isn't happy about it at first, and she is always distracted, her mind out in places elsewhere. the wine bottle is clenched in her thin white fist. they take turns drinking from it, and occasionally they will have a real conversation, one that feels like they might be transported back into school robes with textbooks held tightly in their cool hands.

they do talk about ron. and ginny. the two red-headed siblings who they find have defined their lives so quickly, it shocks the both of them. it is a somewhat veiled conversation, not because they want to avoid the subject, but simply because they don't know how to come to the subject. like it is a point on a hill they can see but are still climbing towards.

they are sitting on the beach. it is the very beginning of morning. she is already drinking, but so is he. they haven't slept much, taken turns on the one bed that they must share. her eyes are dark and the skin around it is swollen and bruise-colored.

she is wearing a sweater and swimsuit bottoms. her legs are white and straight out in front of her. she takes a swig of the wine, hands it to him and asks, "have you talked to her?"

the wine is thick in his brain and he says, "should i have?" he shakes his head, rubs his face and says, "i didn't mean that. i meant..." but he's not sure what he meant. he doesn't know what he means anymore.

hermione laughs, a deep rich laugh. she holds her liquor well, and it dawns on him that she isn't as drunk as he thinks she is. she leans back on her hands and gazes right at him, right in the eyes. "i haven't even said anything to him. not an owl, not a phone call. not that there's many forms of communication here in this... place." she waves her hand around and they both laugh.

"why this place?" he asks, taking another swig of wine. "why is this the place that roger took us?"

hermione looks at him for awhile, blinks twice. "this is the place of beginnings. these islands... started a lot of things. it's where things start... they evolve. they change. they begin again."

there is a second when the world is quiet. the tide is coming in, he can see it coming in against hermione's thighs. but then, hermione grins smugly and adds, "also, i think roger has a thing for seals."

they both laugh and are then quiet. the sky is turning orange in the rising sun. he finds he can't quit staring at the sun glow, can't keep thinking of the same color of red hair left on his pillowcase after all those restless nightmare nights. can't help thinking of the days when things were simpler, were more episodic than they are now, where everything feels like the line on the horizon. where every battle has no surrender or defeat. it's a reload situation that he lives in now. that they live in now.

"in ways, i envy them," she says. when she lifts the bottle to her lips, her arm brushes against his.

he looks at her, at her mussed hair. he understands what she has said, understands it down to his bones.

"i want to know how it's possible," she continues, her voice low and quiet. she isn't angry, there is no trace of maliciousness in her voice. "how they don't carry this war deep inside them, like a child that you both fear and are in awe of. how they come home and hold us and don't feel the... change that. well, it changed us, this war changed us. oh, harry, how can we be happy knowing what we know?"

it comes to him how right she is, but he can say nothing to it. the morning is a deep red on the horizon, and he thinks of the blood that coats the both of them. how far back the blood goes, how the ground they step on seems to be a giant graveyard. they are always careful of their ghosts, they have learned to live with them. sometimes he feels like he's become one of them.

"sometimes i feel like if i touch him, he's just become a wisp of smoke in my hands. or maybe i will. maybe i will just be a pile of threads, come loose in his hands." her eyes turn very slowly towards him, as if she is afraid of what she might see. and then she has seen much in life to know that the things in front of you might be the final and last horror, and he understands.

the light is coming and it lays on her face. it seems like it rises from inside her, and her hair is askew and the freckles on her face are light as toffee. he reaches for her face, traces his thumb over the freckles, over the scar above her eyelid where she had been struck in the great war.

"you're real to me, hermione. you're not going anywhere. you're not coming undone, i won't let you." and he means it, but he also knows it has nothing to do with him. has it ever? has he had anything to do in the survival of hermione granger? they all say the boy who lived, and he is sure, or at least some part of him is still sure he's alive, but no one says anything about the girl who saved the boy who lived, who lived herself. but now the tide is coming it, it's covering them.

his hand lingers. for a second, his thumb brushes over the pale skin of her lips. she licks her mouth and her tongue is warm against his finger. the water is cool against the milk white of their thighs.

hermione rises, and his hand drops back to his side. she looks out into the horizon, clenching the wine bottle before she says, "you're fable to the whole world, harry potter, but know that you are more flesh and blood to me than anyone i've ever known. maybe that's why... why, everything. it explains a lot, the solidarity of the both of us, the solidarity from me to you."

when she walks away, the water is to his waist. his hand is still warm from her breathe. he lays down, lets the water slide to his chin. he closes his eyes, thinks of the past, knows that the past is so intrinsically part of him that it feels sewn to his skin. part of him is the past, part of him knowing that the future is part of the past.

soldiers of their past, of their future, the both of them. everyone else, trying to get rid of their violent past. and god bless them for it, those red-headed siblings, for doing it. but how can they, like hermione said, _how can we be happy knowing what we know?_

the water rises, up to his face, over his face. he stays. his eyes are still closed, but behind his eyelids, he sees a great white bird rising into the blood red of the sky. it is followed by another. together, they take the horizon in perfect flight. a single silhouette, shadows to the world. when he rises, opens his eyes, there is nothing there. hermione is gone.

he walks back, thinking of the warmth of her skin, how good and solid it felt all the way to his bones.

he asks her questions, but she knows that she cannot answer them. not yet. she still cannot figure out the logistics. it drives her crazy, because what people do not understand about magic, what is never written about it in the books, is that is very basic. it is more science than fiction, more mathematical than the ineffable. so now she must do more than look up incantations. that is the basic elementary levels, when words and letters held their own kind of fantasy. this is a matter of logarithms, of bits of string theory.

roger gets her a large muggle white board. she finds it easier than having charmed letters and figures float around the room, around harry as he makes breakfast in the morning, as he tries to read up on the ancient books that litter her cabin.

the cabin itself has taken on its own smell, of tea and sweat and the sea and the smell of harry potter. she has known it all her life, has found her senses tingle at the presence of it. but now she intensely aware of it. it pervades everything: her clothes, her hair, her skin. but he is always with her now. back in the past, in the days of the war, when they were always together, they were not always together, not like now, when the nights get chilly and breezy and salty and she finds him laid sprawled at the edge of the bed over the tips of her feet. or the nights when she finds that she must sleep by him by the fire. it's his warmth that has spread to the deep insides of her.

she thinks of ron, always. it's like an itch she cannot scratch. she imagines him at night pacing the hallways of their house. of course, she had planned ahead. she had left a very good confusion charm that would leave him wondering, _how long has she been gone?_ or _what am i looking for?_ for weeks. until she figures it out. which she must, she must. for ron's sake. it is a love that caught her by surprise, one that she realizes that should have never have happened to her. or perhaps should have happened to her in another life, one that isn't full of the war and the boy who lived. it should have happened to muggle hermione, one who's parents were never tricked and who never walked into the train compartment of a boy who held tragedy inside of him like a ticking bomb.

roger asks her about her progress. he is always glistening in the heat of the day, and his face grows more solemn everyday as he looks at her white board.

harry asks him, "do you have a newspaper, mate? have you heard, well. how everyone is?" by everyone, he means _the world_, because she knows that he holds the burden of all those living inside of him. it is a responsibility that she feels like a phantom limb.

roger smiles, halfly. he is trying very hard, for both of their sakes. "no, i'm sorry, mr. potter. papers do not as readily reach this part of the world." and, as if in response to a forthcoming question, roger adds, "and you will find magic stranger here too. a little more primal. it does not work... the same. which is to our advantage in many ways." she understands what roger is saying, what he is implying. harry does too, she sees it in his scrunched brow: those on the other team will not see them. they will be hidden, at least for a little while, here in this island that is stranded in the pacific. those who do not want the boy who lived to live anymore will not find them- this relieves her in a way that surprises her at first and then realizes that she just hasn't had her guard up like this in awhile. her constant vigilance has been numb since the death of the no-named, but it has still been part of her. for her, the war was a war of survival of a few, of the good, and to know that they are still safe makes her feel happy if only for a second.

the days stretch into a week. a whole week and the board is full. their skin, once cream white, has now turned a delicate shade of gold. during the day, they lay stretched out on the cabin's porch, trying to catch cross breezes. she has gotten used to the smoky smell of his sweat. she has always known the swirls of his fingerprints, but now she finds them everywhere—on the pages of her books, pushed into the ink of her whiteboard, in the crusts of their fireplace-baked bread, on her own skin.

but this is what the week has done: she has noticed the tiniest things about harry potter. she has realized he has a cowlick that pushes his hair to the left. that he has more scars than she can count. that when he laughs his voice hitches at the end as if expecting something bad to follow. that she can out drink him any day of the week.

but it is the end of the week, this long hot week, that she knows two more things. she figures these things out when they are sitting on the beach, which is full of tide and seaweed. somewhere off in the distance, there is the call of some bird, a purr-click that echoes off the water in a sad sort of way.

they are not drinking, because she has given up the notion that this will help. the thoughts of ron do not go away with every sip. and at the end of the week, she isn't done with the equation.

he reads her thoughts, "the wine doesn't help. it doesn't do anything but make me slowly lose my mind. but maybe that's how it is. which i wish it wasn't. i wish that things were… as easy as they always said that they would be. that they promised to us. the world they promised to us was a lie."

she looks out in the distance, not at him. "some people can have it though." the night moon rises, full and grey. "they have it." they both know who she is talking about.

"good," harry responds. he is wearing only a pair of navy shorts. the salty air makes his hair stand on end like he has been electrocuted. "good for them. i only wish that we could do it too. well, you know, hermione." he looks at her with a nonchalant expression, like of course. of course she knows.

and then she figures it out, once and for all. what she had always known. of course. but now she is truly sure that she has done it. to the both of them.

at the end of the week, she finds she has doomed them. that the tragic half of both of them has won, the fighting side, the aware side has opened its eyes and there's no going back now.

he is still looking at her, over his glasses. his eyes, a half itself, the mother who died to save the world. half here, half here, always dying, forever separating. a constant division.

she refuses to cry. she bites her lip. she does not look at him.

on the moonlit horizon, there is a sudden break in light. two birds, long-winged, flutter right over their heads. they call to each other, a language all their own. it is the purr-click of the distance, the sad conversation that invades the night air. they come closer, swoop down the sea. soon, they are close enough to almost reach out and touch. a webbed foot reaches out and breaks the salty lip of water. it a sort of dance the two birds share.

"i've seen those birds before," harry notes. he is sitting up, and he is closing his eyes, brows knit. "i've seen them on television. it was the last thing i saw before i left her. before i left ginny."

she nods, not knowing what to say. the part of her, textbook hermione, comes out suddenly and she says, "they're the species _Phoebastria albatrus_." she feels his dark stare and she laughs, says, "or more commonly known as the albatross."

"ah, more commonly known. yes, of course," he notes slyly with a smirk. they both grin. his brown chest is smooth in the night.

then, suddenly, he reaches out and tucks a stray hair away from her eyes. it is a simple touch, one to remove obstruction, but she suddenly finds her throat dry, finds herself mumbling quickly and with eyes adverted towards the birds, "the albatross has one of the longest wingspans of any birds. almost six feet at some lengths. and they mate for life. they are one of the few monogamous birds on the planet. they mate once and only once. it is a biological closeness so deep that if one dies, the other often follows shortly after. they are almost like two parts of whole. they…"

and here she comes to her last realization. here, it comes to her, in a perfect equation. the solution, the numbers, the hours and hours.

and she knows what it means, what it implies. it means that two logarithms are bonded in their center. a bit of game theory, a bit of biology, a bit of pure magic, the ineffable. she stands, ignoring harry's calls towards her. she stares blankly ahead, the numbers swirling in her head.

she realizes the price she will pay for genius. the price they will both pay; she cannot look him in the eyes.

"we've got to die in a way," she whispers, "we've got to give the world our ghosts."

even after surviving all those wars, all that blood, she realizes that it leads them here again, back to death once again.

overhead, the albatrosses swoop and then led out a long sad wail. she feels herself doing the same.


	4. Part 4

Albatross

_pt. 4_

_A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.  
~ Charles Darwin_

the next morning, in the cabin, he waits for her. he supposes it's right, after all this time she has waited on him, that it's now his turn.

the numbers on the whiteboard don't make any sense to him, not in a logical way. but the longer he stares at it, the more he sees a sort of bird: numbers long and complicated on two sides until they pinched in the middle by a simple equal sign.

roger comes in the morning. he is whistling, cheerful. he is adjusting the tie to his suit when he sees the whiteboard.

the world stops. literally. harry can feel the sweat on his face undrip, can hear the animals outside suddenly hush. the air is silent, empty of the sea and world. roger stares intensely at the numbers and when he finally glances at hermione, he says, "you've done it, miss granger."

she merely whispers, "i know. isn't it horrid?"

he shouldn't know what is happening, but he knows in a way. a way in his chest, the way he always knows things. hermione, she knows things in her head, a deep click in the brain, but he knows it somewhere in the middle of him. not the heart, but more visceral. like the very center of him knew, knows now.

roger turns to him, says, "mr. potter, i suppose you understand in a sort of way. but, well, miss granger you would do better explaining it to him."

the look on hermione's face seems to express that she wants nothing less than to explain. he knows the look: the pursed lips, the scrunched brows. hermione granger loves to talk, but not in these moments. she was always terrible at bad news.

but hermione granger is no coward and she simply breathes in a lungful of air. she says, slowly, as if each word costs her (in a way, it will cost them both, he knows that somehow), "harry. please. you don't have to do this. i wish i had never figured it out. but there's no use, since i've done it now, gone and ruined everything. but here it is."

she looks at the whiteboard, shakes her head and waves her hand over it. "the numbers are practically useless, really. the point is that i figured it is possible. possible for us to do what's already done to us. we can… essentially fight the two wars at the same time. because, oh harry, the war never ends. we will have to keep fighting it. but they don't have to, those two, and they deserve as little heartbreak as possible. they don't know that the other side will never give up. and neither can we."

he glares at the whiteboard, sees where the numbers narrow and become almost one. like a reflection. like two parts that say the same thing in a different way. it comes to him then, "we can do both? we can…"

and then it comes to him, like a harsh slap in the face. he sits stunned for a brief second before glancing slowly at hermione, completely perplexed, "but how?"

"we'd have to essentially, become a sort of… patronus?" hermione throws her hands in the air. "there's no real word for it, i suppose. i don'tt know this form. it's never been used before."

roger sighs, interjects, "it's been done, miss granger. there's troops of us. and now it's my turn to intercede. because, you, mr. potter and ms. granger, would become one of us. it's a new life. a more liquid life. you'd learn new things about time, forget about it. you won't be the same. you will…_ache _more. in ways, you already know me. in ways, you don't, because time is funny like that. the part of you that goes back home, back to your loved ones, will live in the normal time. the other part, it will... it will live in the inbetween. in time, but apart from it at the same time."

it's too much, really. harry sits with his feet folded in front of him. he feels like a boy again, sitting silently in a hogwarts office while the sinewy form of albus dumbledore explained all to him.

he processes the information: he can be broken into two, a different form but as seemingly solid as roger. he will fight with the ones of his kind. he will fight with hermione.

at home, the red-headed siblings will have children with the boy who lived and the cleverest girl from hogwarts.

"they will live with ghosts," he says, quietly, almost a whisper.

hermione frowns. "don't they already?"

he blinks. from the corner of his eye he sees the equation. then, finally, he says, "yes. let's do it. only if there is no other choice."

hermione says nothing, just looks at her feet. it is roger who says, with the lowest of voices, "no. there is no other choice."

-

what he doesn't know is that he cannot do the equation. they can't really _do _it. it is a cause and effect sort of thing. she thinks of explaining game theory to harry, but she decides that it will do no good. not because he will not understand it, but because explaining and understanding does no good. it cannot be done. it just _happens._

she just doesn't know how to start it, so that it can happen. harry thinks that she is kicking at random objects because she is frustrated or sad. mad even. really she is trying to set off a section of events that spirals into the ripple of… well, she doesn't completely know exactly. it is a matter of time, and like roger said, time is funny like that.

they travel to a section of the beach they do not know. the water is full of driftwood and there are small pools crawling with tiny blue crabs. harry marches to each little pond and kneels on his hunches to view the small little ecosystem. he smiles up at her sometimes, in a sad sort of way, and says, "it's a whole world, here in a puddle. a whole world."

she wonders if this how her life will look after she can finish the equation. because once it starts, when time kicks the events into action, then she will actually have to do a tremendous amount of magic in a milliseconds time. she wonders if she will die from it. it is a small thought, her own death, perhaps because she has pondered it so often before. but then she realizes the fragility of the thought, the bird-shaped formation of it. _if one dies, the other is often soon to follow. _she cannot forget, she tells herself.

the day is bright, but cooler than it has been. harry is wearing a white t-shirt. his hair is lopsided, sloppy. almost boy-like, like the boy she once met when her hair was too bushy for her head.

they keep walking down the beach, occasionally climbing over a crop of black rocks. the sun is long slung on the horizon. the day is still young, salty with dew.

harry walks alongside her. she is used to the heat of his body, almost like it has become a limb of her own. so when he grabs her hand, points to the bird in the sky, she doesn't think twice. he says, "look, hermione! A _Phoebastria albatrus_!" he says this with a crooked grin, but when she looks at his face, she sees a joy so pure that she feels a hard lump rise in her throat.

and then she knows, knows as soon as she sees the yellow-gray sun slant over his face. she has known it for a long time, perhaps since she walked into his train cabin and thought _oh, there you are. _she thought this and didn't know why exactly. but it came to her, over the years, like pieces of puzzle fitting slowly into place. and now, she has placed the last piece down and she knows. she knows she knows she knows.

she, hermione jane granger, has a little sliver of her in harry potter that might never be hers again. it was caught in him from the beginning, and she wants him to keep it forever, wants his skin to wrap around it.

and now he is looking at her, and she knows he can read her thoughts as if they were written on parchment. he was never good at that, reading her mind, but she is sure her face says it like the moon rising over the ocean; clear, bright, perfect.

overhead, the birds soar. she can almost see through their perfectly-white wings. but mostly she can only concentrate on harry's voice as he says, "i don't know what's going to happen when we're ghosts, hermione, but there was a life before that and we were real. don't. well, don't forget that. and in that life, harry potter was just an unlucky boy in a lot of ways, but he was lucky in many special ways. and the most special was a girl named hermione granger who came into my life quite by accident in many ways. but accident or not, she was the missing whole in my life at all times. you… you never left me, hermione. and even in this next life, you're not leaving. you never left."

he is shaking her a little, like he is trying to get flour to sift. he wants her to look at him, but she can't, because her eyes are full of hot wet prickly things and she feels suddenly very exposed. the dentist's daughter wasn't supposed to lose it. she is a being of practical manners, not the silly things of young girls.

he keeps talking, in that sad low voice. "and ron and ginny, there can be love for them too. we will love them, but we left them and they left us. but, we're just…" and he looks up at the birds slicing soundlessly through the air above them. "we're just each other's albatross. we can't… make it without each other. we can't, hermione. it's impossible."

the tears come without permission. she cannot stop them. but when they come, that is when she can finally look at him. in many ways, he is still the boy who lived, with his lightening scar and jumbled black hair. but now there are creases around his eyes. his chin is peppered with the beginnings of a beard. he has become the man who lived and now must die. his hand is taking her tears into a loosely clenched fist and she cannot stop herself.

when he presses his lips to her, they are firm, salty to the taste. his body is more bone than sinew, but so is hers, she suspects. it is a kiss that she suspected would never come, only because it was harry and before there was only red hair and a boy who made her laugh, made her sometimes forget that her life wasn't meant for larger things. but her life isn't like that, and she can't leave it. she knows that now.

she wishes she could feel sorry for ron, that she could feel a stab of betrayal. but she knows that it's useless, like a flower feeling sad for blooming, for a lightening bolt regretting cracking awake a fire. things are supposed to happen. she will give him what he needs, her final gift. she'll give both of them, the two siblings of red hair, she will give them her death.

his lips are still on hers when she feels the shift. at first, she thinks her feet are just wobbly from the heat, from the beach lapping against her ankles, from his breathe that tastes of tea and salt. but soon she realizes why the world is tilting; she has cast the beginning spell, the warning incantation the second the words, _yes, let's do it, _were uttered from his mouth. and here is her warning, she knows it now.

the spell is complicated. it involves a sort of _ripping_, a sort of duplication. complex in both its death and its birth. she feels the inside of her splice like when a dead hangnail finally falls from the skin. it is painful, in a bruised sort of way. the world around her is underwater, or at least it feels like that. his lips are still on his, but she knows he feels it too, the internal split. but now all they have is the embrace, and they must hold fast, for they know if one goes, so does the other.

in a flash of nothing, like the earth was sucked of oxygen and then forgot what just happened, they disappear. they disappear in a way.

the birds overhead swoop once and then into the horizon towards the sun. the sun, which is rising over another small island in the atlantic, foggy in dawn, where a red-headed woman hears her door unlock and turn. there are footsteps on the kitchen floor.

"hello?" she asks, her voice almost caught in her throat.

later, she will call her brother and he will say, "yes, hermione's back too. why are you so worried? she only went our for groceries."

a man with black hair holds her around the waist and she says into the receiver, "oh. perhaps you're right. perhaps you're right, ron." she will forget, kiss the tossled black-haired man on the mouth.

all will be well.

-

but the war never ends. there are battles always.

they won't write stories about this, she knows. the stories that she and him share after the island are too much for the people who write their stories to understand. people need happy endings. people need _endings_. she is not sure she can provide either.

when the first child is born, she feels it so heavily, she cannot move for days. she feels like she has received a phantom-limb. she will carry it with her for the rest of her life.

sometimes she will read the papers, the ones that follow those children of the war stories. there are many of them. there are pictures of her, heavier and happy, on many television sets. her children, red-haired, are hard to look at. it _aches._

roger tells them once, "time will find you eventually. the other piece of you flows through you. they feel you, too."

but there is a war to fight.

his hands hold her in place, like an anchor. she feels like she bleeds his blood.

"some things have to be done," she tells him. he smiles at her, moves a piece of hair from her face.

"some things just have to _be_," he says. he is right, she knows, and she takes his smallest finger in her hand as they walk next to each other. their hands spread apart, casting wing-like shadows, walking into time where parts of them grow old while parts of them don't know what old is.

_end_

_Author's Note:_ Thanks to all who have read and reviewed! I appreciate all of your feedback for a little story that is quite odd and confusing at many turns. But those kids, those two scrappy tragic kids with crazy hair and a love for each other that runs so deep and thick through their veins it can't be denied, they hold a place near and dear to my heart, and I feel like they deserved a noble ending to their story. So that's why this little story exists, if only for my own catharsis. Hope you enjoyed it!


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